Um… yes… but that’s only as lyrically powerful as observing that eggs are literally food, or that chryslers are literally cars. Doesn’t invoking the word “literally” require there to be some contrasting non-literal interpretation?

“Sandpipers… they are literally birds of the beach!”

“You keep using that word. I do not think it demonstrates insightfulness the way you think it demonstrates insightfulness.”

The biggest issue with Lytro seems to be the software, which is atrocious. The windows app requires a gaming-level video card to be installed in your PC, or it won’t run. The Mac version tells me that my three year old Mac Mini is too slow to run it. I finally installed the iOS software on my phone (5S) and it’s so horribly buggy and slow that it crashes trying to download photos… every single time.

I bought one of the first-gen Lytro point-and-shoots (which you can get for a tenth of their initial retail price), thinking it would be fun to play with, but it’s a paperweight since I can’t even get the photos off of the thing because of these software issues.

A $1K camera discounted to $45? That’s just desperation. At that price it might almost be worth it for people just curious about the tech, but it seems unlikely to get a serious use as a camera.

Lytro’s tech unfortunately requires a serious sacrifice of 90% of the resolution for the sake of the effect, which means that even a cheap DSLR (and possibly a good cell phone, even) will extremely easily beat it in quality.

Then there’s that either you keep it on Lytro’s site, or you convert it to a standard JPG, discarding everything the fancy tech provides. Then it will just stand side by side with pictures produced by much better hardware.

Same here; the 1st gen software on Mac is horrible. On my Mac Pro it took several minutes to load, and you were required to store your images on the Lytro site for sharing. It was fun to play with for a day or so but was essentially useless. Sold it on eBay a long time ago.

Yeah, no. There is no “regular” price for this long since discontinued, failed consumer product. Old MSRP or street price, sure, but the “regular” price for this contually liquidated device would be something like the last liquidation price, not the years-old price from before they were discontinued.